Avatar vs Bloodbath vs Storm Bolt discussion

I’d like to start a discussion about the lvl 90 tier of talents, from the standpoint of a dps-warrior (prot will take Avatar in the majority of cases). From the discussions I’ve found here at MMO-champion regarding these talents, I don’t feel everything has been said about them. Avatar and Storm Bolt have been discussed extensively, but I feel that the value of Bloodbath has been underrated thus far. Here's my line of thought, please correct me if / where I'm wrong:

So far, the discussion of this tier of talents has been based on the following post by Siguror, a while ago on the official forums:

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The rage generation change breaks the level 90 talent tier. Now that Storm Bolt isn't displacing anything, it becomes a pure 400% weapon per 30 seconds.This means it does 800% weapon damage every minute. In order for Bloodbath to match that, you need to do 2666.7% weapon damage over 12 seconds, or ~333% weapon damage per GCD (assuming full GCDs). Considering that not all GCDs will be filled, and attacks do between 150%-200% weapon damage, Storm Bolt is some 50% better than Bloodbath.Storm Bolt does 2400% weapon damage every 3 minutes. With 60% Enrage uptime, Windfury Totem, and 12% Haste, Arms will generate 4 RPS from auto-attacks. Avatar will give 2 RPS for it's duration, which means 40 rage (i.e. 1.3 Slams). This means Avatar needs to do 2140% weapon damage from it's bonus damage modifier, or 10700% weapon damage over 20 seconds. Assuming 7 auto-attacks and 14 special attacks, that's an average of ~714.29% weapon damage per GCD to match Storm Bolt.

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There are a few things in the above reasoning that are inconsistent with today’s situation, mainly regarding the power of Storm Bolt.

Storm Bolt: 400% weapon damage, 30 sec cooldown, on the gcd.
Due to the fact that Stormbolt is on the general cooldown, it isn’t the flat-out 400% weapondamage per 30 seconds that it’s made out to be. Due to its high damage it will take priority over pretty much any other ability in the rotation (perhaps save for the rage generators), where it will take the place of another ability which in the majority of cases will be a damaging ability.
The increase in damage won’t be 400%, but 400% minus the damage of the ability it replaces (which is anything between 0% for an empty gcd to 215%+ 2679 for a slam.
Advantages:
Able to be used at range, to get a good opener on ranged target switches / the start of the fight.
Damage can be enhanced by Colossus Smash, although cooldowns don’t line up properly (less of an issue for arms, more painful for fury).
Also usable as a stun on adds, if required.
Disadvantages:
On the GCD, as described above.
Cannot be used as a burst ability on many types of adds, due to many of such mobs being susceptible to stuns.
When choosing Storm Bolt you give up a traditional damage increasing cooldown, which for many (myself included) takes an aspect of fun out of the gameplay.

Avatar: 20% increase in damage, 30% increase to rage generation (especially valuable during the execute phase, where the added rage won’t be converted into extra slams or heroic strikes, but into additional executes), 20 sec duration, 3 minute cooldown. Off the gcd.
Advantages:
Lines up nicely with the cooldowns of Skull Banner and Execute (considering 4p T14, reduces CD of Execute to 3 min).
Longer duration in execute phase compared to Bloodbath (assuming the phase is longer then 12 seconds).
Disadvantages:
due to the long cooldown on Avatar, you'll often have to hold back on usage, in order to have it available for the execute phase, where it is absolutely mandatory. There are many fights, at least in the current tier, that last between 3 and 6 minutes. This reduces the uptime of Avatar in practical situations.
A calculation of the amount of rage generated by Avatar under a normal rotation would have to be done to be able to pinpoint its exact value, whether above or under 20% of the fight. Every 30 rage translates into an additional Slam/Heroic Strike/Execute. Does anyone have any good numbers on rage per swing / average rage per second?

Bloodbath: 30% extra damage flat-out on specials. Given that auto-attacks are 10-15% of our damage, it cannot be considered a full 30% dmg boost, in practice it'll be closer to a 25-27% damage boost. Duration: 12 seconds. Cooldown: 1 minute. Off the gcd.
Advantages:
Due to its relatively short cooldown, it can pretty much be used on cooldown without much consideration for not having it available during our main burst of damage, the execute phase. Practical uptime will be very high.
Duration (12 sec) is identical to Recklessness duration (12 sec). Avatar would favor glyphing Execute for better synergy.
Very high synergy with the glove tinker for Engineers (Synapse Springs, 1 min cooldown, 10 sec duration, 1920 strength increase).
Very high synergy with Dragon Roar, practically adding 30% to the value of Dragon Roar if always used in pair.
Historically on-use trinkets haven’t often been preferred, proc-based trinkets have often been the more powerful choice. When the warrior has Engineering, this would boost Bloodbath considerably more then it would boost Avatar or Storm Bolt.
The uptime of Colossus Smash would be higher, percentually, in a bloodbath opposed to an Avatar. Both are pretty much guaranteed one full Colossus Smash in their duration, with a chance of proccing a second for Arms.
Can situationally be used as a slow for adds
Disadvantages:
If the target dies before the bleed wears off, you lose damage.

Per 3 minute cycle (the cd of Avatar) it would have a 36 second uptime, opposed to the 20 seconds of Avatar. It does 25-27% more damage, opposed to 20% of Avatar. Does the added rage generation of Avatar, keeping all the above factors of practical uptime and extra rage for executes, still make Avatar the superior choice?

Off course all the above is still easily countered by 'depends on the fight', which is 100% correct. Still, I think the discussion is an interesting one.

What are your thoughts regarding this tier?

Last edited by Inquis; 2012-09-17 at 09:30 PM.
Reason: Updated according to posts below

30% extra damage flat-out on specials. Given that auto-attacks are 10-15% of our damage, it cannot be considered a full 30% dmg boost, in practice it'll be closer to a 25-27% damage boost. Duration: 12 seconds. Cooldown: 1 minute. Off the gcd.

Sadly this is not how Bloodbath works, it will tick for 30% of the strongest attack that procs the dot during the uptime of the buff, the dot is then refreshed by all following melee attacks and overriden+refreshed by stronger attacks. The procs don't stack with one another like the old Deep Wounds did. In reality it ticks across the time of about ~24s, as you will mostly refresh the dot just before you loose the Bloodbath buff.

Across countless dummy tests and dungeon runs, it never accounted for much more than about 5-8% of my total damage as TG, on average dealing about 140-150k damage at level 90 every 1 minute. Never ticking for much more than 20k non crit even with all cds popped. This is by all means not terrible, but I cannot help but feel mildly underwhelmed by Bloodbath for a lvl 90 talent.

Bloodbath did however consistently provide a greater dps gain than Stormbolt for me as TG, and far more than Stormbolt with SMF, SMF Stormbolt is weak as piss.

Bloodbath is also fairly nice for AoE, popped together with Bladestorm and you will perform a BLOODSTORM!

Last edited by Calamari; 2012-09-19 at 03:17 AM.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs..

Here's my experience with the talents after about 3 months of beta testing:

Bloodbath isn't underrated. It is the best option for single target on most encounters. DR has procced BB for a few builds now but I don't know if that was intended. What is really nice about BB is that you can pool rage before it comes up and then dump a large amount of rage into it when it is active much like you would with a Colossus Smash as Fury. Line it up with a CS, dump as much rage as you can during that CS along with using a heroic leap and then follow up with a DR. During my dummy tests I have it at around 8-10% overall damage at 80-85k dps between the two specs.
I think Avatar is itself underwhelming and I don't think the 4-piece will change that. There may be certain burn or execute phases during progression where it may be useful. A few fights where I tested out Avatar were: Will of the Emperor, Wind Lord Mel'jarak and Elegon.
I was a big fan of Storm Bolt early on but then I discovered BB and right now I think it's usage is limited to lower item levels and Arms two target cleave (because of how rage intensive this is).

For Titans Grip:
I wanted to run some sims comparing Storm Bolt to Bloodbath to get a better idea of where the two stood in relation to each other.
My initial thoughts have always been Bloodbath > Storm Bolt as SB has the opportunity cost of a GCD every 30 seconds.
Mathematically, Storm Bolt does more damage per second in comparison to it's counterpart Bloodbath.

So when I use Storm Bolt instead of Bloodbath in the sims it should be able to reflect this superiority in Storm Bolt damage (which it has)
However, as I suspected, the opportunity cost of a GCD every 30 seconds held Storm Bolt behind:

As expected, Storm Bolt's DPS of 3358 > Bloodbath's DPS of 2934
In addition, SB's % of Total DPS (5.3) > BB's % of Total DPS (6.1)
However, because BB has a much higher DPE (damage per execution - meaning the total damage coming from the single execution of the ability ex. the combined damage of a DoT)
BB's DPE of 164,231 compared to SB's 107,109 is ~53% higher.

This all amounts to a TG Warrior with Bloodbath having a +520 DPS edge over a Stormbolt.

Bloodbath's DPS of 5,625 is now 89.8% of Storm Bolt's 6265 (+2.4% increase)
Bloodbath's DPE of 317,055 compared to Storm Bolt's 201,140 is now 57.6% higher (+4.6% increase)
And BiS TG Warriors using Bloodbath now have a +1221 DPS edge over Storm Bolt

When I was trying Arms, I took Stormbolt just to fill the inevitable empty GCD (same with Roar). As Prot I would take Avatar unless I was doing like a dungeon farming spec or similar. As Fury I'd take Bloodbath since Fury has less empty GCDs.

Glad to see we’ve got a good discussion going on. Even though I’ve been proven misinformed a few times, guess that’s what you get for assuming without testing for yourself. Did run a few of my own tests on the beta now.

Originally Posted by Calamari

Sadly this is not how Bloodbath works, it will tick for 30% of the strongest attack that procs the dot during the uptime of the buff, the dot is then refreshed by all following melee attacks and overriden+refreshed by stronger attacks. The procs don't stack with one another like the old Deep Wounds did. In reality it ticks across the time of about ~24s, as you will mostly refresh the dot just before you loose the Bloodbath buff.

Across countless dummy tests and dungeon runs, it never accounted for much more than about 5-8% of my total damage as TG, on average dealing about 140-150k damage at level 90 every 1 minute. Never ticking for much more than 20k non crit even with all cds popped. This is by all means not terrible, but I cannot help but feel mildly underwhelmed by Bloodbath for a lvl 90 talent.

Bloodbath did however consistently provide a greater dps gain than Stormbolt for me as TG, and far more than Stormbolt with SMF, SMF Stormbolt is weak as piss.

Bloodbath is also fairly nice for AoE, popped together with Bladestorm and you will perform a BLOODSTORM!

If I read correctly into your post, you’re saying that Bloodbath takes the highest hit within its duration and keeps ticking that (30% over 6 seconds) hit. I’ve just done some dummy tests to try to recreate this, but so far I’ve been unable to.
Before going into this further, my own tests a minute ago confirm that bloodbath ticks off both Dragon Roar and Shockwave currently. Whether this will make it to live we cannot say, but this is the current situation.

Now, trying to create the above situation, I went ahead on a dummy with Bloodbath > Dragon Roar (the highest hit of all my hits in that Bloodbath) > normal rotation where I didn’t crit anything except Overpower. It took a few tries to get nothing to crit, but yeah…
If the above would be correct, then Bloodbath would take the value of 30% of my Dragon Roar (84k in this test) and continue to tick on this number. This wasn’t the situation however. `

30% Of my Dragon Roar is 25213.5. This divided by 6 (the number of ticks it should generate) is 4202.25. The first lowest tick of my Bloodbath was 4203 dmg, according to Recount.
The amount it ticks continues to scale up however, up to a tick of 10524. This cannot come from one hit, as that hit would have to have been 210480. No attack in this test came close to this number.

I’ll assume that the bolded ones are amplified by Bloodbath. Adding up the damage of the bolded attacks, we come to a number of 407188. 30% of this is 122156.4. Still missing something. However adding any of the non-bolded attacks, I don’t come out at the number Bloodbath provided. Possibly an error on Recount’s side.

Now I’ll admit right away that this is hardly a scientific test, but it does give us reason to believe that Bloodbath does add up 30% of the damage done by our special abilities flat out, into a stacking bleed.
My tests obviously aren’t hard evidence, I’m a horrible mathematician, worked with manually punching some numbers into a calculator and used a very small sample size. I encourage everybody to run his own tests, to see if you come up with something similar, or whether I messed up.

Originally Posted by Underskilled

Just a small detail, but storm bolt does not cost you heroic throw as a filler. You will have both abilities, and they both will be on separate cooldowns.

Good point, I didn’t see that one yet, I assumed it replaced Heroic Throw.

Chapterhouse’s logs show Bloodbath at 9.5%, 7.3%, 8.4%, 9.2% and 10.6% of his damage. This averages out at 9% of his damage. This seems like a very good number for something off the GCD, that you only have to push once per minute?

Now, anyone have some numbers on rage generation, so we can try to get a decent look at the value of Avatar?

Quick question- what are you doing to make 2 overpowers deal 130k+ dmg

Can't test Bloodbath without being lvl 90. Tests are done in the PvP gear that's readily available to everybody. Character was unbuffed during tests, I dont even think I used Battle Shout. Test was performed on a regular lvl 90 testdummy. The numbers aren't the point of it, the mechanics are.

I’ll assume that the bolded ones are amplified by Bloodbath. Adding up the damage of the bolded attacks, we come to a number of 407188. 30% of this is 122156.4. Still missing something. However adding any of the non-bolded attacks, I don’t come out at the number Bloodbath provided. Possibly an error on Recount’s side.

Sorry for the misleading and utterly false information, I somehow had this vague memory of Bloodbath ticking -alot- harder when triggered by a Slam or high stack HS, but that would still be explained by Bloodbath averaging out the total yellow dps you put out during the uptime of the debuff. Thanks for clearing that up.

As for the value of the Rage generating aspect of Avatar, if the Arms numbers on Simcraft can be trusted, then it would seem in BiS T14 gear we can expect to have an approximate resource gain of 6.9 rage per second: http://simulationcraft.org/505/Raid_T14H.html

Taking the Arms warrior as an example, it shows a damage per rage ratio of 16841 damage for each point of rage spent (times 6.9 and it results in ~116202, which is very roughly the dps result of the overall Arms sim).

Raising this 6.9 Rage per second value with Avatar to 8,97 (6.9 times 1.3, or a 30% rage gen increase with Avatar up), grants roughly 2.07 extra rage per second for 20 seconds. I'm propably missing something, but would it be totally wrong to assume that by gaining an extra 2.07 rage per second, times the 16841 damage-per-rage, would result in 34860,87 extra dps, not counting the % dmg increase?

From ~116202 dps to ~151063,77 dps, increased by the 20% extra damage from Avatar to roughly 181276,524 dps. That would mean an almost 56% damage increase for 20s during Avatar from both the +rage and +20% damage components combined.. sounds far too high to be true, so I certainly made a brain fart somewhere in there.

One big limiting factor to the value of the extra rage component of Avatar would be the inability to efficiently spend all the extra rage without resorting to alot of no-or-low stack Heroic Strikes, or resorting to Slam spam which might disrupt the flow of the core rotation unecessarely.

Last edited by Calamari; 2012-09-19 at 04:26 AM.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs..

As for the value of the Rage generating aspect of Avatar, if the Arms numbers on Simcraft can be trusted, then it would seem in BiS T14 gear we can expect to have an approximate resource gain of 6.9 rage per second: http: //simulationcraft.org/ 505/Raid_T14H.html

Taking the Arms warrior as an example, it shows a damage per rage ratio of 16841 damage for each point of rage spent (times 6.9 and it results in ~116202, which is very roughly the dps result of the overall Arms sim).

Raising this 6.9 Rage per second value with Avatar to 8,97 (6.9 times 1.3, or a 30% rage gen increase with Avatar up), grants roughly 2.07 extra rage per second for 20 seconds. I'm propably missing something, but would it be totally wrong to assume that by gaining an extra 2.07 rage per second, times the 16841 damage-per-rage, would result in 34860,87 extra dps, not counting the % dmg increase?

From ~116202 dps to ~151063,77 dps, increased by the 20% extra damage from Avatar to roughly 181276,524 dps. That would mean an almost 56% damage increase for 20s during Avatar from both the +rage and +20% damage components combined.. sounds far too high to be true, so I certainly made a brain fart somewhere in there.

One big limiting factor to the value of the extra rage component of Avatar would be the inability to efficiently spend all the extra rage without resorting to alot of no-or-low stack Heroic Strikes, or resorting to Slam spam which might disrupt the flow of the core rotation unecessarely.

Thanks for those numbers. Although I personally find the numbers for full BiS to be only mildly interesting (lets face it, by the time we have that gear the tier is over, right? Plus, as a casual raider I personally wont reach full hc BiS), they provide a good basis to work from.

Using these numbers, our rage per second raises by (8.97 – 6.9) 2.07 per second. Over the course of 20 seconds, this is 41.4 rage. These being numbers for BiS, realistically over the course of progression, this number will be lower. I think it’s safe to assume it’ll still be over 30, so according to these numbers Avatar will grant us –one- extra Slam, Heroic Strike or Execute during it’s duration.

Could be me, but that seems a little underwhelming. In the best scenario (execute phase) that’ll be one extra execute.
Again using Chapterhouse’s logs as data, his average execute (on the raid-buffed simulation dummy in Shattrath, and assuming the high amount of crits he got, under the duration of Recklessness as they will be in practical situations), his average execute was 543480 (543k) damage. Amplifying this by 20% (as it’s under the effect of Avatar) it’ll be 652176 (652k).
That’s still a buttload of damage :-)

It’s beyond my ability (as said I’m a very poor mathematician) to math out the average damage an Avatar would do, given an average fight, adding the numbers for one additional slam (above 20%) and one additional execute (under 20%) on top of the value of 20% increased damage over 20 seconds. Volunteers? ^^
Bloodbath’s average damage is a lot easier to math out, just look at a bunch of logs and take the total damage of Bloodbath, divided by the number of uses (not the number of minutes the fight lasted, to rule out player skill).

---------- Post added 2012-09-19 at 01:22 PM ----------

Actually, just using those simcraft numbers you provided, it doesn't become all that hard.

Single minded fury: 123768 dps. Over 20 seconds this is 2475360 damage.
Amplify 123768 by 1.2 (Avatar increase) and that times 20 (seconds), is 2970432 damage.
The difference is 495072 damage. Add the average execute on that, and Avatar in the very best possible situation of full BiS Single Minded Fury in Execute phase gives you 1147248 damage (1.1 million).
(Actually this isnt 100% correct as the avg. number of execute is boosted by Recklessness, a large percentage of your damage during that execute-avatar-use would be as well, and the simcraft number shows damage of the course of a fight. On top of that, Chapterhouse probably wasn't full BiS SMF when creating the numbers for these executes, so take the numbers with a grain of salt).

All the other situations would provide lower numbers then this obviously.

Blues mentioned that DR should NOT be proccing BB. Only melee weaponed based abilities should. If DR is proccing BB, then it's a bug.

Keep in the mind the blue post was BEFORE the build in which Dragon Roar was changed to Fire Damage.
After it was reverted back to physical damage and made to ignore Armor it has since then been proc'ing Bloodbath.

This has been said in front of devs and brought to their attention many times but nothing had been done about it.
So at this point in time, I HIGHLY doubt it's a bug. That or the devs lack reading comprehension skills. (Which is also a high possibility given their track record.)

Storm Bolt for pve. See Landsoul's youtube guide to final war changes for details. Avatar is pretty much a must in pvp. Bloodbath only if you think you can boss it up with TG/Staggering/Reckskullstorm.